@RnaudBertrand has been having a lot of interesting takes lately. I’m not yet convinced this entire analysis is correct but it’s definitely interesting to think about. What do you think?:
"This may seem contradictory to many, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
A lot of the “Trump-adjacent” leaders like Milei who pursue radical change agendas at home may actually counter-intuitively prefer China than the U.S. as an economic partner precisely because it enables their transformative projects: China doesn’t interfere in internal affairs and they’re extremely predictable and stable. As Milei himself puts it: “They are fabulous. They don’t ask for anything in return. All they ask is that I don’t disturb them… They want to trade calmly.” ( https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2024/11/28/an-interview-with-javier-milei-argentinas-president )
Trump, on the other hand, while being ideologically similar to Milei, is not exactly the non-interfering and stable type… He is all about making the U.S. more more unilateral and unpredictable which, while this is probably what Milei himself would do if he were U.S. president, it’s less attractive if you’re on the receiving end. In particular, Trump might insist that countries like Argentina distance themselves from China which Milei wouldn’t want to do because, as he puts it (in this Buenos Aires Times article) both countries have “complementary economies.”
That’s one of the big Trump ironies: his “America first” ideology is pushing his “my country first” ideological brothers to make China their partner of choice. They share Trump’s anti-liberal vision of domestic transformation but conclude that China’s hands-off approach actually gives them more freedom to pursue it than Trump’s volatility would.
All in all, we might arrive at the paradoxical situation where the more aligned ideologically you are to Trump, the more you’re going to gravitate toward Beijing. And those who dislike Trump the most, your neoliberal types, will remain America’s most faithful vassals due to their nostalgic faith in the liberal order that Trump is dismantling. Go figure"
I’m not especially familiar with all this so maybe I’m off base, but considering Milei moved to stop joining BRICS, I think this poster is wildly overselling whatever point he may have. Saying Milei ‘prefers [trade with] china’ over the US is pretty close to demonstrably false in light of that.
Yeah on the whole it does seem too paradoxical of a statement to be true. I also think the OP is exaggerating the point a little.
And yes, Milei did nix Argentina’s BRICS entry but afaik he also made a number of other boasts and promises about how he was going to decouple from China and we’ve seen how he has been humiliatingly forced to backtrack on pretty much all of that simply because it was not economically feasible. Instead he had to go cap in hand begging China to give him money. Ideologically he certainly wants to remain a loyal comprador puppet for the US, but the objective material conditions appear to be forcing Argentina regardless of who is in charge of its government slowly but steadily, perhaps inevitably, into the direction of China.
It really doesn’t matter then what Milei himself wants, because his hands are tied by the economic reality he finds himself in. If the overall geopolitical and world economic trend continues this way then all he did was delay Argentina’s entry into BRICS. This is likely what China is betting on, this is the long game they are playing in which temporary setbacks like this really don’t matter and trying to fight the Global South integration which BRICS represents is as futile as fighting against the laws of physics. And even if doing a 180 on BRICS is unlikely for Milei himself as it would be too much of a political humiliation, in just a few years someone else will be in charge - and what are a few more years to China which is used to thinking in terms of decades (if not longer)?
I’m not quite sold on the first part of that last paragraph but the second part definitely seems to be correct: “those who dislike Trump the most, your neoliberal types, will remain America’s most faithful vassals due to their nostalgic faith in the liberal order that Trump is dismantling”.
That’s exactly what we’ve been seeing and what has also been reflected in recent comments by various EU leaders warning about “not allowing anti-Trump sentiments to turn into anti-US sentiments”. Even as Trump humiliates them and exposes the hypocrisy of the West’s liberal-imperialist moral pretenses, the comprador European ruling class bends over backwards to affirm their loyal vassalage to the US.
It’s quite sad and pathetic, and all it shows is that they still don’t get that the world has irreversibly changed. They still think that Trump is an anomaly that they just need to ride out, meanwhile completely failing to understand that the US elites have, by and large, already seen which way the wind is blowing and have placed their bets on Trump and his crude, openly self-interested imperialism rather than attempt to keep up the old crumbling liberal façade.
The US is now clearly in the process of cannibalizing its vassals’ economies in order to consolidate into a less overextended and more “defensible” position as they continue to lose ground in the rest of the world at an accelerating rate. Their foothold in Asia is not sustainable in the long run and i think they know it. Sooner or later China will push them out.
So if it can’t preserve its global hegemony, Washington will at least make sure to lock down Europe and North America…(and ideally they would very much like to control their entire hemisphere, which is why we should expect to see in the coming years a heavy focus on trying to subjugate as much of Latin America as they can, while they still can, and in particular on finding a final solution to the Cuba and Venezuela “problems”).
In theory it should work that way, but these global south populists are america first, their nation second. Milei end goal is not making argentina great but having a podcast in Miami ala Jaime baily
Very good point. Compradors by definition can’t be nationalists, even though they may larp as such.
I’d also put some heavy quotation marks around “populists” when it comes to right wing “populism”. Though i’m not even sure that label applies to Milei. Isn’t he just an ancap?
Correct, they don’t care for the people. The goal of the capitalist class of these nations is to take orders for 100k soccer balls from adidas and have them made by cheap unskilled labor in their factories for 10 cents a day. Also to send their skilled labor abroad and collect remittances.
Populist rhetoric is not universal, it manifests different in each country due to the specific conditions of each country. Milei can be both an ancap and a populist in the context of Argentina.
His anti-state rhetoric is unbelievable popular in Argentina, not without reason, the people have legit grievances with the state due to a high amount of taxes theyve had to endure for decades and the high amount of bureocracy involved in many aspects of daily life. Paying imperial core tax rates while living in global south conditions is not ending well anytime.
